They were the active agents of destruction, the argument went — raiders who attacked and burned the great Bronze Age centers, destroying the trade networks and administrative systems on which Bronze Age civilization depended.

But this explanation has serious problems.

For one thing, the Bronze Age Collapse affected regions that the Sea Peoples are not associated with, including Mycenaean Greece.

For another, the scale and simultaneity of the collapse across such a large geographic area is difficult to attribute to any single group of raiders, however formidable.

The current scholarly consensus, developed particularly through the work of Brandon Drake, Eric Cline, and others, emphasizes what might be called a systems collapse model: the Bronze Age civilizations were deeply interdependent, their prosperity resting on trade networks and resource flows that were vulnerable to disruption.

When several shocks hit simultaneously, the cascading failures of an interconnected system could produce catastrophic collapse even when no individual shock would have been sufficient to cause it alone.